Christmas is coming

Apparently. I spent today at my 'centre' for Open Christmas. We have the basement, ground and floors 1 to 4 of a fairly nice, currently unused office block. It has heating, aircon, proper toilets, showers, space and well, I do really hope it's going to be great. We got a lot of the buildings agreed quite late in the day, including this one, so it's been all systems go in terms of getting the places ready for opening to our guests on the 23rd.

I've not been involved in 'set-up' before so didn't know what to expect when I went along today. There was a group of volunteers who came in to do shifting, lugging, pushing, breaking up, putting up, shoving and generally getting things done. Our greatest achievement in my mind, was getting an industrial-size freezer from the loading bay, down into the basement, up to the kitchen area when we were absolutely convinced that: (a) the thing was too tall to get in the first lift without turning on its side; (b) we didn't know how to open the first [car] lift and (c) definitely completely and utterly for sure it wouldn't fit in the second lift at all, let alone go around some of the corners. We were wrong. It fitted with mm to spare (well, 2mm at least) and we didn't even squish any fingers or run over any toes doing it!

As a 'green badge' aka assistant shift leader, I was in more of an organising, thinking, second-guessing, planning, directing, wandering about type role for the day. It was hard work! And my back was killing me. I mentioned that to the medical services team when they visited for their recce but they weren't terribly sympathetic for some reason. We've identified where specific rooms and stores are going to be, and the minimum number of volunteers we need to run the place safely. The volunteers did a wonderful amount of clearing and it will be interesting to see how far it has all got by Thursday when Mike and I go along to help for the first of two days.

Best be off now. Got to write up some notes and e-mail them around to people.